The Tribune

“WE KNOW that there are those of you who are looking for jobs, who are looking for security, and who feel that more could have been done,” Prime Minister Christie told a Progressive Liberal Party mini-rally in Marathon recently.

“We have never claimed to be perfect but I tell you this: we have never stopped working and providing opportunities for the people of this country.”

Mr Christie’s words seemed to be an echo from the past - the past of 1992 when the Public Treasury was bankrupt and unemployment out of control.

The people were hurting while a beaten Prime Minister, baffled by an unexpected defeat at the polls, talked to a reporter in his Conch Sound, Andros, constituency and wondered why?

“We knew people were hurting,” Sir Lynden Pindling said as he reflected on his 25-year rule. The “one man’s dream” that he had carved out for himself and his “all for me baby” inner-circle had collapsed. Suddenly he realised that God had not “given this country to the PLP”.

“We knew that homes were being sold, we knew that parents were taking kids out of school,” Sir Lynden told the reporter, “but we didn’t think that this would have affected them so dramatically in determining what they would do during the election.”

Sir Lynden was in such shocked disbelief that he felt Bahamians would soon wake up, see what they had jettisoned, and be done with the Ingraham government in three years - he didn’t think the new government could last a full term. In fact it lasted 10 successful years.

Mr Christie, now facing his constituents and fighting for another term in office, confessed that his administration “never claimed to be perfect”. However, he was still confident that Bahamians would look past the high unemployment and a society haunted by crime and return his party to power for another five years.

“I have no doubt whatsoever that in the quietude of your homes when you think about it, you know if you’re going to make an investment in your future, the best investment you can make is in the PLP,” Mr Christie told those attending the Marathon rally.

“So when people have to make a choice when they ask themselves who they should vote for, look at the record. Look at the record and then when they look to the future and the challenges that will be in front of this country they must ask themselves, one by one as they examine the candidates in this general election, which party has put up the team that is the best team.”

Yes, let’s look at the record. Mr Christie’s government was returned to power with the promise that it would solve the crime that was destroying the country. Before the 2012 election they erected large billboards declaring that “Under the FNM - 490 + Murders (a record)”.

The billboards were erected in tourist areas in an economy that owed its survival to tourism. Mr Christie told Bahamians that the PLP had the solution to eradicate crime and, if returned to power, Bahamians would once again have a peaceful society.

However, when crime continued to grow and get more violent, Mr Christie was asked if he didn’t now regret allowing his party to elect those billboards. “No,I don’t regret anything in a political campaign,” was his surprising answer.

If this is so, then he should have no problem condemning the scandals now shattering his own party. His attitude, after winning the 2012 election, seemed to be “all’s fair in love and war”.

The Christie government came to power with promises - but few, if any have been kept. Crime is out of control. In five years there were “490 plus” murders under the Free National Movement; to date for the same period under the PLP there have been 619 reported according to The Tribune’s records. So far, for almost the first four months of this year there have been 50 murders. Six in a six-day period round last weekend. The figure grows daily.

Many promises have been made to provide a National Health Insurance programme to ensure that no Bahamian goes without medical care. Health Minister Perry Gomez has said that already more than 2,600 people have been enrolled in a plan with a budget of $100 million. However, the good doctor has had to acknowledge that government does not yet know how it is going to fund the scheme. Already there is a tone of failure.

And then there is BAMSI, a project dogged by misfortune that is supposed to feed the country and reduce the cost of food importation. Will BAMSI, an expensive project, eventually become another Hatchet Bay disaster?

On taking over the successful 2,000 acre Hatchet Bay farm at Alice Town, Eleuthera, and getting rid of the scientists and skilled Bahamians, Sir Lynden boasted that Hatchet Bay under his government was to be “the greatest success story in agricultural history in the Bahamas”. Thanks to ignorance, it was a colossal failure. On the floor of the House of Assembly in 1991, then Opposition leader Hubert Ingraham accused the “incompetent wasteful” Pindling government of having “murdered” the once prosperous Hatchet Bay Farms “in cold blood and in broad daylight”. His words were mild when one remembered the colossal disaster.

When one examines the Christie government’s record - with some of the “all for me baby” group being exposed as feathering their own nests first - it would indeed be a foolish people who would go to the polls on May 10 and vote for five more years of such failure.